Aunt Norie’s Sewing Room

“Alone in a crowd”: Haven’t we all had that feeling? Haven’t we had a need to isolate ourselves and get away from it all?

One can, you know, go to a crowded mall, get away from it all, we say, take a stroll down a crowded street, down a lively walking trail and feel so free, so alone with our thoughts, our plans, even in a crowd.

I guess I first learned to do that in that one-room schoolhouse. The teacher would call each class (our largest class had five students in it) to the front of the room. Many times it was more interesting to listen to them but I also learned to tune them out and work on my own assignment, as the teacher would call each grade forward one after the other.

A man tells his story, after several years in prison for a crime he had not committed. He says, “I did not live there. Oh, my body was there, but my mind, my thoughts were not; they were at home with my family.” He had studied law and had actually helped solve his case.

He really had managed to be alone in his own world, even in prison, freeing his mind for his work.